Video conferencing systems are in wide-spread use and enable participants who may be in vastly different geographical locations to have face-to-face meetings without the need to travel great distances. When participating in such conferences, it is desirable to know when new participants join the conference, to see the video of the participants throughout the conference, and to be able to determine who is on the conference at any time during the conference.
In prior systems, new participants to a call have been announced using the audio portion of the conference. While this can be an effective way to announce who is joining, it can also be very distracting to those who are listening to a speaking participant. Also, in prior systems, when the video of a participant became degraded or was not present, the video would simply be displayed in degraded form or omitted entirely. In many case, this made it impossible to determine who was speaking when a listener was not familiar with a speaker's voice. Similarly to new-participant announcements, when a roll call was performed in prior systems, the participants would be announced in the audio portion of the conference, which, as described above, can be distracting to listening participants.
Therefore, in accordance with various embodiments, it is desirable to provide video conferencing systems which overcome these limitations of prior systems.